Happy Halloween! (Patreon)

Happy Halloween, everyone! 🎃

I hope you're all looking forward to a good night. Hopefully a better one than this hapless trick-or-treater is having!

You've got to say one thing about Beatrix: she certainly knows how to get a message home. Too old for trick-or-treating? Beatrix will show you the error of your ways by making sure you don't get to eat the sweets you've collected. Instead, you'll be enjoying a nice, healthy bowl of mush!

Now then, last night I finally got around to watching a film I've wanted to see for years. It's the French classic Les Diaboliques. I'd always been intrigued by it because of its famous warning at the end, asking the viewer not to reveal what they've seen. And what a ride it was! Definitely a slow burn, but with an atmosphere of dread that was absolutely perfect for this time of year.

It also got me thinking about one of the wonderful things about being alive at this particular moment in history. Yes, there's always exciting progress being made, but isn't it fantastic that we can also cherry-pick from everything that's gone before? All the art, films and entertainment ever created are there for us to browse through. We can discover something made decades ago and still be completely wowed by it today.

And when it comes to the particular interests of this page, there's certainly plenty to explore in those old films and cartoons!

You don't see quite so much in contemporary entertainment, the old-fashioned movie comeuppance. The days of John Wayne putting a fiery-tempered redhead over his knee while the violins played merrily in the background seem to be long gone. But every now and then, modern films still give us a moment when you can't help thinking that something else ought to happen!

Take Monsters vs. Aliens, for example. Towards the end, a gigantic woman has the villain completely at her mercy and tells the photographers to get their cameras ready. Now, if ever there was a moment when it would have been fitting for the baddie to go over her knee, that was it! You can almost imagine the photographers getting a rather different sort of picture. I'd wager quite a few people watching secretly had exactly the same thought!

Then there's M3GAN, which has her own rather memorable ideas about dealing with bad behaviour. She even delivers the wonderfully ominous line: “You know what happens to bad…”

And sometimes, it's not even what you see but what you hear. In Godzilla vs. Kong, we have a particularly unpleasant (and stunning) female character who eventually meets her end. But listen to the panic in her voice as she realises what's about to happen. It's just the sort of sound effect that makes you imagine a very different kind of ending — one involving a hairbrush and a rather sore backside, rather than an explosion!

Have a listen and see what you think…

https://youtu.be/7ZmuUtpPwJo?is=bVMVN9RXfl7_wAyY

Do you agree, or is it just me? 😂😂

Anyway, let's get this comic finished today!

But I should say, don't worry, Beatrix doesn't normally go in for all this tying-up business, but apparently some trick-or-treaters require a little extra persuasion!

Updates on the way.